The Renku Sessions: Invitation
Welcome to this renku session. I am Linda Papanicolaou and I’ll be your guide.
Many thanks to John for inviting me back to the haiku foundation to lead a renku. This time we will be writing a 12-verse shisan. This is a modern form, developed by Kaoru Kubota in the 1970s. It has a structure that blends both traditional and modern elements. Unlike the single-sided junicho—which you have recently written—shisan has four sides of alternating three and two-line verses that follow the traditional jo-ha-kyu progression of preface/development/close and includes the traditional four seasons plus love, moon, and blossom topics. One non-traditional feature is that the seasons occur in their natural order, one per side. For me, the most distinctive feature is that its 12 verses in four sides creates a rhythmic pattern of 3/2/3 2/3/2 3/2/3 2/3/2. The poem may thus be read linearly, like a traditional renku, or by pausing on each side to take in its three verses as a unit. This is what gives shisan its complexity despite its short length. If you’d like to read more about shisan form in the context of renku tradition, I recommend the comments by Eiko Yachimoto that were published by John Carley, “Shisan—the Anatomy of a Renku Sequence,” World Haiku Review Vol 3:issue 1, March 2003 ( https://whrarchives.wordpress.com/2011/08/27/shisan-the-anatomy-of-a-renku-sequence/).
We will be using a summer shisan template from Carley’s Renku Reckoner (Darlington Richards Press 2013, pp 62-65). For those of our participants in the southern hemisphere, this will mean writing out of season for the hokku, though as the renku progresses through the seasons, each of us will be writing out of season for three of the four sides (more, for those of us like me who live in a climate zone without winter. In addition, four or five of the verses will be non-seasonal.
For clarity of season, use a recognized saijiki such as the World Kigo Database (https://worldkigodatabase.blogspot.com/), the Yuki Teikei Haiku Society’s Season Word List, or any of the other resources on the Yuki Teikei Kigo page (https://yths.org/season-word-list/).
Our first side will be summer. This is what it will look like:
hokku (3 lines): summer
wakiku (2 lines): summer or no season
daisan: (3 lines): no season
Please use the submission box below to submit no more than two verses for the first verse, our hokku. Submissions will close on Monday, July 28 at midnight, eastern US time. Selection for the hokku and instructions for submissions for our wakiku will appear here on Thursday, July 30.
THF strives to maintain a safe and friendly environment for our readers and site participants. Participation in our offerings assumes respectful and appropriate behavior of all parties. We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone, for any reason, at any time.
If you see something you feel may violate our Code of Conduct, please report it to the appropriate moderator or the President here.
